What kinds of things did I learn in my first year of art school?

Art matters.

This idea sounds simple, but it came over me like a wave that artistic activity, creativity, and visual design were everywhere in the world. I’d seen examples of art around me all my life in different forms, from my mother’s musicianship and singing, to the occasional painting on the wall or on an aunt’s easel, to the multitude of cartoons, comics, and animations I saw each week.

Through all of it, I’d felt an invisible barrier, an invisible, inspid judgement that told me “This is only entertainment and frivolity. It doesn’t really matter as much as math and science. It’s not important.” In my first year of art college, I began to understand how wrong those opinions were and how much art and design were really interwoven and embedded into everything I saw, heard, and felt.

My perception of the word “teacher” changed.

My art college instructors could be addressed on a first name basis. Student-Teacher interactions could be casual, informal relationships, not fearful and structured, like in high school. Students in Emily Carr tended to be adults and were expected to act like it. (Having said that, some male instructors could also be sexist pricks, drinking in their offices with their favoured female student – or so I’d seen.) Basically, instructors could be as human, fallible, and full of shit as any other adult.

Many of my instructors were working artists or professional designers. They inhabited many of the artistic or academic communities and the same creative working world that many Students aspired to join.

College education was a business, and teaching could be a passion or a calling to some faculty, but as often as not, it was also someone’s job. The best teachers seemed to be the ones who were as curious as their students, who cared about education, and who demonstrated that they had remained active learners.

My understanding of the role of art and artists changed.

My high school understanding of what art was about had been limited to the names of a few artists, descriptions of a few major painting movements, and skills-wise, predominantly based around drawing, painting, or printmaking. I’d learned about art within a narrow range of traditional, historical disciplines. In high school, art and design were treated as completely separate disciplines (art being “fine”, and design being “commercial”). They were taught by different teachers in completely separate contexts.

In contrast, my first year of art college exposed me to a broad spectrum of ideas from geometry, architecture, and engineering. It connected artistic manifestos with social and political movements, and blended ideas from physics with technical aspects of colour theory and visual perception. I learned that art movements were often motivated by philosophy, influenced by psychology or social change, and that media and methods could be inter-related, mixed, or practiced in multi-disciplinary ways.

I began to see how art, science, and technology could connect to one another, and how they could inform each other in the wider world. I slowly started to believe that art and design could have a role in my future, but I just didn’t know what that role could possibly be.

Were there any practical skills and lessons?

I suppose people may wonder about the practical aspects of a post-secondary arts education. Did I, for example, learn technical skills that would help me as an artist or designer? In this first year, I’d say the answer was no, but a lot of my assignments forced me to do my best in terms of drawing, composition, using colour, or thinking creatively to solve various challenges. Nobody said “that colour is the wrong choice”, or “hold your pencil like this”. Foundation year wasn’t that prescriptive in terms of how you were instructed technically. At the start of the term, we were given a shopping list of art supplies for first year (I think I spent about hundred bucks at Opus art store buying from that list) but whether the subject was life drawing, colour, three-D, or creative processes, it seemed up to us to figure out what tools we’d need to bring to any given class and how we’d use them.

The best advice I remember receiving during my Foundation year came from my very first class on my very first day: “You’ll find that the two most important books in your life will be the dictionary and the yellow pages.” (Remember that this was in 1985, about ten years before the web, and fifteen years before Google.) It’s still sage advice.

Seeing the diversity of a wider world.

It was wonderful to meet my fellow students, who each seemed to come from diverse places and backgrounds. Some were local, some from elsewhere in BC, some from the other side of the country, and some from all the way across the world. I talked to some of them and learned a little about their experiences and expectations. The ages of my classmates ranged from as young as eighteen and fresh out of high school, to well over sixty, and winding down a professional career in another discipline to pursue a new one. I was surrounded by an amazing diversity of attitudes and life experiences.